“Acclaimed actor and Oscar-winning director Richard Attenborough, whose film career on both sides of the camera spanned 60 years, has died. He was 90. The actor’s son, Michael Attenborough told the BBC that his father died Sunday. He had been in poor health for some time. Prime Minister David Cameron issued a statement calling Attenborough ’one of the greats of cinema.’ ’His acting in Brighton Rock was brilliant, his directing of Gandhi was stunning,’ Cameron said. Ben Kingsley, who shot to global fame for his performance as Mahatma Gandhi, recalled Attenborough’s passionate 20 year struggle to bring Gandhi’s story to the big screen. The film won eight Oscars, including best picture, best director for Attenborough and best actor for Kingsley. ’He placed in me an absolute trust and in turn I placed an absolute trust in him and grew to love him,’ said Kingsley. ’I along with millions of others whom he touched through his life and work will miss him dearly.’”

“For a second year in a row, Miley Cyrus hijacked MTV’s Video Music Awards on Sunday night, and this time she did it without debauched dance moves or wild tongue gyrations. In fact, she did not even take the stage. Instead, the rowdy pop star sent a 22-year-old homeless man in her place—a 180-degree turn toward a serious cause and away from the frothy, twerking performance she offered last year that ignited a global media firestorm. Near the end of Sunday’s live show, at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., when Jimmy Fallon announced that Ms. Cyrus’s ’Wrecking Ball’ had won video of the year, a longhaired man who said he was from Oregon and had recently been living on the streets of Hollywood appeared at the microphone. ’My name is Jesse,’ the young man said, reading from notes without mentioning his surname. ’I am accepting this award on behalf of the 1.6 million runaways and homeless youth in the United States who are starving and lost and scared for their lives. I know, because I am one of those people.’”

3. “Left-handed cinema.” Can even small, apparently insignificant, details—such as whether a character is left-handed – affect how we read a film?

“Levity aside, I come to a more delicate issue, and one where subjectivity cannot be eliminated. Do left-handers look different? The ultimate delicacy in that question is not so much toward the feelings of left-handed people, but in how we think and feel about what we are seeing. In North by Northwest, in the scene in which Thornhill/Grant is shaving, there is another man beside him doing the same thing. The other man turns to stare, because Roger is using Eve’s ladies’ razor. But within the frame there is this added tension: that there are two ways to go—naturally, and Roger’s, which is the least common.”

“In a sense, it’s like Miller’s having two third acts at once. In one story, he’s a crank who may have torpedoed one of the most illustrious careers in comics through a mix of self-indulgence and impolitic ranting; in the other story, he’s the dark dreamweaver of Sin City, a celebrated co-auteur without whom this clearly-still-perceived-as-potentially-lucrative franchise (there’s also a TV series in the pipeline) would be nothing. His name appears twice in the Dame to Kill For trailer, like some seal of approval from Badass Housekeeping. For Miller in particular, it’s an interesting reversal of fortune: Comics may not want him anymore, but the movies do.”

“Smith distances himself from certain stereotypes that small-minded, under-sexed people might negatively associate with young gay men who enjoy multiple partners and the ease at which modern technology can deliver them to your door. And assuming this is the truth and that he isn’t doing that thing that some guys do when they put ’No hookups’ in their Grindr profile and then hit you up for some dick as soon as they message you, that’s great. This is undoubtedly many gay men’s experience when confronted by the ostensible expectations of modern gay culture. It can all be really intimidating if you detect that you don’t have the same approach to interacting that all of the people around you, the people you’re supposed to bond with as a matter of course, seem to be having.”

Video of the Day: The trailer for White Bird in a Blizzard:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

Slant is reaching more readers than ever before, but advertising revenue across the Internet is falling fast, hitting independently owned and operated publications like ours the hardest. We’ve watched many of our fellow media sites fall by the way side in recent years, but we’re determined to stick around.

We’ve never asked our readers for financial support before, and we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or subscription fees. If you like what we do, however, please consider becoming a Slant patron.